A LOST ART

Shannon News, 6 July 1926, Page 2

A LOST ART

THE CHAK3I OF TALK. UNKNOWN TO RESTLESS MODERNS. DUMB DANCING MONKEYS. "He talked far above singing,'" remarked Hazlitt, concerning one of the members of a really brilliant circle that lived at that time. Coleridge, Hazlitt, Lamb, Leigh Hunt, with minor stars to make up galaxy! We get a very good idea of the charm o£ these rather unconventional evenings at Lamb's from a paper in Hazlitt's "Table Talk." A bit of cold leg of mbutton, flanked by bread and cheese, was probably all the supper, but food for the inner man did not worry that queer company much when there was such excellent food for the mind writes Vose Levu in the Auckland "Star." Could anyone imagine a roomful of people in the.year 1926 being satisfied with talk? If a present day hostess invited half a dozen people to a cold leg of mutton supper and expected them to entertain themselves and the company on mere talk, she would be voted queer in the head. She might get a few guests for the first evening but after the news of it got about it would be the jest of that particular circle of society for a month, and the poor woman would never survive. Nowadays we must be doing two or three things at a time, and some people fear having nothing to do us a certain person is said to fear , holy water.

That pidture in an advertisement of a young wonian in a bath with a wireless headpiece on may have been a slight exaggeration, but ic most certainly showed the trend of modern liJe. People are so tingling ' wiili nerves that \the pleasures and pastimes of our ancestors are quite inadequate to keep us amused. Worst of all the modern loath being left to their own devices. Even people who are supposed to be educated and possess a certain amount of culture rather dread sitting sitill, '" To an Arab the modern squirming, restless individuals one meets at every turn would seem quite mad. The son of the desert can sit in dignified silence, engaged with his own thoughts — thoughts that may not be singularly elevated, but squatted there on the ground he does certainly make a more dignified and manly figure than' Jie ever-hurrying modern, with his indefinite features and his hungry eyes.

Why is it that life to-day so closely resembles jazz music? We cannot blame jazz for it; the soil must have been ready for the seed. Even an ordinary party given by ordinary people rather resembles the -accounts one reads of a Roman feast. Think of the Lambs' -cold leg of mutton, and wander round the modern supper table, with its oysters, trifles, souflees; compots, chocolates, and all : manner of expensive comestibles, which are certainly pretty to look at but are not half so good for one as cold leg of mutlton, and bread and cheese. s Then for amusement you will probably have a wireless set, a gramophone, a pianola, cards, dancing, and a few other things thrown in. But of talk you will have absolutely nothing beyond the usual commonplaces about current events, and the silliest repartee among the more juvenile. We have quite last that charming gift of conversation, just as we have lost the art of letter-writing. Both are rated as old-fashioned *s curl:-! and crinolines. We are to-day certainly much smarter, but whether we arc as clever, or as happy, is certainly open to doubt, if net denial. In train or tram or bus the scraps of talk tha.t reach one sugges; that the minds of the men and boys move in a circle bounded by the football held and Elleiislie racecourse; and that the minds of their femals belongings are quite incapable of absorbing any ideas that don't come from kitchenettes, picture houses and cabarets.

"I had to take to cards, things that I loathe, in sheer defence,"- said a cultured lady the other day; "today you are never asked anywhere 'just to spend the evening; you have to be able to amuse yourself or the other guests f One is never asked to drop in and have a chat; there is always some form of excitement." It is all very true, and rather deplorable, for, after all, we cannot jazz through life, and even the fascinations of bridge pall in time. If a person has nothing within himself or herself to fall back upon, he or she is bound to have a miserable old age. It is only people of character who can talk interestingly, ami the utter desolation of the modern world in the matter of conversation is one of the saddest spectacles of an age that has discovered wireless, radium, and heaven knows how many more things that are supposed to be merely the prelude to the discovery of the very secret of life itself. And man stands amid this aggregation of marvels, not dumb, but a mere chatterer, who must be always doing something with his feet or his hands, and hates nothing so much as being, left alone, or having to give expression ito anything more intellectual than the result of the Auckland Cup, a football score, or the batting averages of the two firslt Test matches.